Dele has a running Q+A with Rob Ellchuk

Dele has a running Q+A with Rob Ellchuk

For those of you who don’t know it, Dele, is a pretty impressive runner. He has worked with Rob Ellchuk from Team Bath.

Dele managed top get him to agree to a Q&A session on coaching and getting into athletics.

Firstly, who is Rob Ellchuk? Rob is an athletics coach based in Bath University sports centre. He’s a former athlete who specialised in 100m and 200m sprints at a high level in Canada. He now provides coaching expertise to a wide range of athletes of differing levels. This includes club athletes, weekend athletes, masters’ athletes and Paralympians. His success at Rio Paralympics earned him a spot on the UK coaching hall of fame for 2016.

Here is our favorite picture of Dele looking like he’s being sick whilst being coached by Rob Ellchuck!

The Q&A by Rob Ellchuck:

Lets start with the reason you were placed on the Coach Hall of fame in 2016. What success did you have at the Rio Paralympic games with your athletes?

Athletes that I personally coach won Gold, Silver and set a 100m World Record in Rio. Unfortunately the world record did not come in the final and that athlete missed out on the medals by a few hundredths of a second.

How do you keep your athletes grounded at such big events?

Usually its pretty easy to keep people grounded, the first thing I do is to get us into a normal daily training routine that closely mimics what we do at home. Then I give the athletes 1 day of getting used to the surroundings before we start everything up. If possible I’ll hold a little meeting and stress all the mundane things that we need to focus on, like eating times/training times/sleep routine and I’ll keep that up as long as I think I need to. Basically I try to keep the athletes focussed on process and not outcomes (good or bad).

How much of the training process revolves around psychology?

In my opinion pretty much everything revolves around psychology. An athlete that isn’t having their training programme adjusted based on psychological issues won’t achieve there best. If a coach doesn’t adjust things based on an individuals emotional/motivational state then they’re aren’t getting the best out of the athlete. I learned a long time ago that as a coach you can’t push someone to do something they don’t want to do, so its important to make constant adjustments between what needs to be done and what can be done. For example, if an athlete doesn’t like a particular exercise or distance, work around it. Find another way to get the work done that the athlete will be ‘happy’ to do that achieves the same thing.

In our next installment Rob Ellchuck will touch on what you need to be a coach.